Did the 70's Moore films chase fads?

UltimateTruth

These films seemed to piggyback 1970's popular culture fads that were prominent right before the films were released....

LALD = Blaxpoitation fims

TMWTGG=Bruce Lee/Martial Arts

TSWLM=Jaws....(well kinda.....Sharks were prominent in TB)

MR=Star Wars (EON admitted that they chose to do MR based on the success of Star Wars/Close Encounters)

Absolutely_Cart

I think all of the post-Connery films have been chasing trends.

Moore's as you said, has the most direct influences but the other actors have still followed trends.

Craig's films are right in line with the HD realistic gritty brooding bloodthirsty vengeful anti-hero trend.

Awesomeshizz

Live and let die - blaxploitation
The man with the golden gun- Kung fu movies [ Bruce lee!!!!!!! ]
The spy who loved me- disco music and lighthearted era
Moonraker- Star Wars and space movies

Gassy Man

Well, even the 60s Bonds chased some fads -- interest in Asian culture, for instance, in the mid to late 1960s. You see it repeated in many films of the period, especially as the U.S. began to get more involved in southeast Asia.

But by the 1970s, a lot changed. The studio system had largely disappeared, and marketing as a science began to overtake the creative process. (I worked for marketing professors in the 1980s, and marketing didn't emerge as a bellweather until the 1970s and 1980s.) The film industry learned to pinpoint audiences with a degree of focus that was almost absurd, chasing the same audiences and to the exclusion of just about everyone. That's essentially Spielberg and the like, whose films are as much the result of careful crafting to appeal to a white suburbanite audience which eats McDonalds and drinks CocaCola as they are entertainment.

Fewer mainstream films were made than under the studio system, but they were all competing for the same audience. This also meant that risk-taking decreased. A studio could release 30 films, of which 15 might be profitable and 2 blockbusters. The money lost and earned could be spread out, resulting in the studio being in the black. But as projects were more likely to be financed independently and only distributed by the studios, the people making the films all wanted -- or perhaps needed -- a major success. So, copying what had worked before became even more commonplace. You can see it not just with Bond but with the flood of sci-fi films after Star Wars and the decade-long trend of sequel after sequel to a successful film. What came out of that period was not just an over-reliance on franchises -- which the Bond films benefited from -- but also remakes and reboots.

Absolutely_Cart

Agree with Gassyman.

Make a new intellectual property:
20% chance - huge profit
80% chance - minor loss

Make a sequel to an old intellectual property:
100% profit - but less of a profit than the original

AlphaOmegaSin

Film Making is really a Gamble.

Higgins

What people don't understand is that until the mid-80s, Bond movies have been done for the cinema!
For the present cinema with all the contemporary audience tastes.

Nobody would have imagined that a bunch of Nerds would dissect TMWTGG 40 years later with the movie being stored on a disk for repeated viewings and with a taste 40 years ahead and played on small tv screens.

The success at the box office was essential and nobody cared a rat's arse how people in 40 years would think about it.

If you don't understand what I mean, just watch Casino Royale and Goldfinger in a row and ask yourself how the pacing evolved.

Absolutely_Cart

Great points from Higgins.

And while films like LALD and MWGG are masterpieces, they have a certain cavalierness about them that I can admire. More recent films like Goldeneye have been really conscious toward what people will think about them and what legacy they had.

Granted that turning a series into a franchise is different from preserving a franchise for generations.

Grazmeister

Isn't it a well known fact that FYEO was originally intended to follow TSWLM but they did MR instead because of the success of Star Wars? (incidentally this is also the reason Star Trek was hauled out of the deep freeze for The Motion Picture lol ) )